My challenge as an entrepreneur (41) – Fola Daniel Adelesi

Issues surrounding seeds (what some people refer to by saying pay your dues) and gratifications are some of the most important decisions you have to make in your businesses and making the right or wrong decision will not be revealed by the immediate succeeding events but by the results that you businesses will produce much later.

When some people are wandering why things are not working, they usually have forgotten that the results they are having are based upon a principle called “cause and effect.” For everything that happens there is a cause so when we get an effect we should find out what the cause really is.

Seeds and gratification, I understood early enough, are principal things in your businesses that work as cause and effect. The seeds you sow are supposed to be the cause and the gratification you get as a result of the seeds after they must have germinated are the effects. Unfortunately some people now have gratification as the cause, because they always want gratification, and the aftermath of this is that they don’t get the desired results because the seeds are absent.

I remember that there was a time in my business when I really needed money. The office was just opening and I needed some other small machines to come into the office so that I can reduce the cost of running the business. I was doing a number of proposals for some organizations and the cost of printing from other shops was eating into my profit. Printing, binding, lamination and some other little stuffs like that were taking unnecessary money so the intention was to fix my television that had been dormant for almost two years because I didn’t have time for it and it was not my priority. I wanted to fix it not to beautify my office but to sell it and get some money to buy at least one other useful machine that can generate money for the organization.

While calculating what might come in if that TV was sold, it occurred to me to give it out. Now I was to take a decision between selling the TV for money to pump into my business and giving it out. In a jiffy I took my decision. I decided to give the TV out. As soon as I fixed it I called someone to pick it up. The immediate consequence is that I would not have that machine in my office but the truth is that I do not know how much that TV has brought back to my business. In my perception, when things work or don’t work they can be traced to some things we have given up or refused to give up for others. For example, don’t you think that the last business proposal you lost could be connected to a seed you refused to give up! The people you transfer things to not because you don’t need them but because they need them may make some utterances that will affect your businesses. I have been amazingly involved in some fruitful business discussions with some people and the speed of the results I get are intimidating. I later came to understand that I had prepared the grounds for that result by some seeds given before the negotiation began. The implication of what I said is that there is a way to begin your negotiation before the negotiation begins. The folks in strategic management call it the intangible realm.Doing some of these things meant some important things for me had to wait but it was worth the waiting. Refusal to wait initially will make you wait longer than you need to.